[NCLUG] Why Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose

[Mike Loseke]

Thus spake Charles Clarke:
> On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Mike Loseke wrote:
> 
> ...
> > match (Exchange sucks really bad, true, but it is the standard for
> > email/calendar in most business and no linux setup can touch it - but you
> > still see lots of linux used to route the mail to the exchange servers).
> 
> Is there anything for linux that will do the calendar, etc like the 
> M$ Exchange server does?

 We recently (within the last year) went through a review of lots of
products and solutions for a single calendar system. We're currently using
a mix of Netscape calendar (IPlanet), Exchange, the calendar that ships
with Solaris/CDE and a few others. Of course, none of these can interact
at the calendar level fully. The goal of the review was to find a single
solution that would serve both PC and Unix users with a native client with
full feature sets across platforms. Believe it or not, we found one.

 We have been demoing a system from Steltor (www.steltor.com), called
CorporateTime Server, with pretty good results and, I believe the plan
is, we'll be migrating over to it very soon now. It has native Windows,
Solaris and Linux clients (and more - even MacOS!) and the functionality
and usability of these clients is, believe it or not, almost 100% identical
across platforms. There's a "plugin" for the Outlook client on Windows to
use the calendar system which removes some of the Outlook menu selections
(because they don't exist on CorporteTime) but other than that it leaves
the Outlook client usable in this environment. I've used both the Solaris
and Linux clients and they work great. I'm not a big calendar user but
this is a nice app.

 Steltor has a commitment to the Linux crowd, which is great. In fact, last
I looked, the Linux client was a bump ahead in the version of the the
Solaris client. As far as the server side goes, yes, it runs on Linux! They
list RedHat 6.1 (like everyone does) as one of the approved Operating
Systems. Here, check it out:

http://www.steltor.com/products/index.cfm?fuseaction=product&GroupID=001-001-000

 One nice thing about this product is that it is calendar only but
interfaces very well with other email server solutions. Check it out, very
nice product. Their engine is even what is at the heart of the IPlanet
server - these guys have actually been doing calendaring for a long time
in huge companies.

-- 
   Mike Loseke    | all this net feterage... it's got to be what
 mike at verinet.com | phantom pains feel like...